November 23, 2010

Over the last week, there have been problems at the Smoking Clip Store…problems we didn’t even know about until people started reporting them.

We’re sorry that there were difficulties; everything is working again fine this week. But if you still have any remaining issues, please email us and we’ll take care of any remaining issues.

We also wanted to let you know exactly what happened. It turns out that it was an incredible series of coincidences.

Basically, a much bigger company owns the download script. Like hundreds of other clients, we pay them by the month in order to provide and track downloads for us.

The problems came when that company’s server had major technical problems – at the same time their hosting company stopped answering support tickets. The company was trying to get the server company to fix things – but the company wasn’t responding.

That meant that, between 11/11 and 11/22:
1. Not all Smoking Clip downloads were available
2. Records weren’t kept of all downloads
And because it wasn’t OUR site that went down, but just the “back end” owned by another company, we didn’t know there was a problem until customers reported it.

The other company finally has everything back and working – all downloads are again available – and we’ve reset downloads for everyone who purchased but didn’t receive their videos.

If you ran into the issue, we apologize for the inconvenience – and if you’re still waiting for a clip, please email us (with the name(s) of the clips you purchased and the date you purchased them) and we’ll make sure everything’s taken care of.

The person who runs the bigger company is actually a former systems administrator for IBM, and in more than 20 years of programming and running systems, he has never seen a set of circumstances like this before – and he tells us it could never happen again. We hope he’s right